Dhrystone, CoreMark, and SPEC

Dhrystone, CoreMark, and SPEC are three popular benchmarks. The first two are synthetic benchmarks composed of important common pieces of programs. Dhrystone was developed in 1984 and remains commonly used for embedded processors, although the code is somewhat unrepresentative of real-life programs. CoreMark is an improvement over Dhrystone and involves matrix multiplications that exercise the multiplier and adder, linked lists to exercise the memory system, state machines to exercise the branch logic, and cyclical redundancy checks that involve many parts of the processor. Both benchmarks are less than 16 KB in size and do not stress the instruction cache.

The SPECspeed 2017 Integer benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is composed of real programs, including x264 (video compression), deepsjeng (an artificial intelligence chess player), omnetpp (simulation), and GCC (a C compiler).

The benchmark is widely used for high-performance processors because it stresses the entire system in a representative way.

SPEC Benchmarks - Published Results